The Fortnite developer Epic reacts to the revelation of a pedophile community on the YouTube platform. Epic will no longer advertise for the shooter Fortnite . YouTube promises action.
This educational video causes a stir: Content creator Matt Watson uploaded a video to YouTube on February 17, accusing YouTube of enabling “the sexual exploitation of children” and profiting from it.
This video has now received 2.4 million views and has been widely discussed.
In the video, Watson explains how to configure a new YouTube account to show videos featuring children by searching for terms like “Bikini Haul”.
These videos are not “pornographic” per se, but a community has formed in the comments that points out timestamps where children are sexualized.
The educational video by Watson shows that ads from companies like Grammarly or Google Chromebooks are displayed before these videos.
Epic withdraws ads – YouTube promises action
This is how Epic reacts: The company behind Fortnite, Epic Games, has stopped all advertising before YouTube videos.
They have reached out to YouTube through the advertising agency to tell them to remove such content from their platform, as reported to The Verge.
This is how YouTube reacts: They claim to have acted immediately and deleted accounts and channels. They have forwarded illegal activities to the authorities.
YouTube condemns any content that endangers minors and has clear guidelines to prevent the endangerment of minors on YouTube. However, there is more to do, and they are working to recognize abuse faster.
This is why it is so sensitive for YouTube: There was a similar uproar in July 2017 over YouTube videos and ads. Large companies sounded the alarm because their ads were shown before content they did not want to be associated with: hateful or violent videos.
YouTube responded with stricter filters and de-monetized certain types of content.
At that time, it was referred to as the great “Adpocalypse”: Some gaming YouTubers saw their income drop because “violent video games” could apparently no longer be monetized.
After that, some YouTubers moved to Twitch.
The criticism that big platforms employ too few “human reviewers” and rely too much on still immature algorithms to enforce their rules has been a major point of contention against tech giants for years.
